The Guardian of Liberty - Nemzetőr, 1986 (9. évfolyam, 1-6. szám)

1986-01-01 / 1. szám

•íow Communists Cheer and Boo — 14 »Reformism“ and "Reformist „Reformism* and „reformist“ are always boo-words in Communist language. They are used in two distinct senses, as a pre-revolution­­ary and as a post-revolutionary boo. As a pre-revolutionary boo, „reformism“ is the notion that the evils of capitalism can be put right by reforms, without a Revolution; after the Revolution, a „reformist“ is someone who says, without the Party leadership having said already, that there is anything wrong with „rea! Socialism" that needs reforms to put it right. Such a person is sometimes said to be suffering from „reformist delusions.“ Of these two senses, the former, the pre­revolutionary boo, is the more important; it is indeed a major heresy according to Marxist doctrine. Marx did not use the term „reformism", but the idea as a boo is clearly there in the com­ments on „Conservative, or bourgeois Socialism“ and „Critical-Utopian Socialism and Com­munism“ in the Communist Manifesto (Ch. Ill 2 and III 3). On the former Marx wrote: „A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grie­vances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. „To this section belong economists, philan­thropists, humanitarians, improvers of the con­dition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole­­and- corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out in complete systems... The Social­istic bourgeois... desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrat­ing elements.“ On „Critical and Utopian Socialism and Communism“ Marx wrote: „In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. „The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Social­ists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured... „Hence, they reject all political, and especial­ly all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means." Such passages show how for Marx, the Revo­lution was what mattered. In the former passage he tries to ridicule „improvers of the condition of the working class" ; in the latter he is sug­gesting that Socialists who „wish to attain their ends by peaceful means“ are, for that very reason, misguided and „Utopian". iA It was Lenin who really added the term „reformism" to the Communist vocabulary. The earliest example comes in the Protest by Russian Social-Democrats which he wrote in August, 1899, against a manifesto by „economists", a group of Russian Social-Democrats who empha­sised the importance of „assisting in the pro­letariat’s economic struggle." In his „Protest“ Lenin wrote: „Marxism has mapped out the correct line, which is equally remote from exaggerating the importance of politics, from conspiracy (Blanquism, etc) and from decrying politics or reducing it to op­portunist, reformist social tinkering anarchism, Utopian and petty-bourgeois Socialism, State Socialism, professorial Socialism, etc). The pro­letariat must strive to form independent political workers’ parties, whose main aim must be the capture of political power by the proletariat for the purpose of organising a Socialist society." („Blanquism“ was the subject of No. 11 in this series, in our July-August, 1985, issue.) Lenin’s contempt for what he called „reform­ism“ is summed up in the phrase „social tinker­ing“ ; the examples of this which he gives are themselves boo-phrases, with no precise meaning except the boo. Lenin devoted a whole article to „reformism“ in Reformism in the Russian Social-Democratic Movement (September, 1911). The bourgeois, he there says, „are coming out increasingly in defence of social reforms as opposed to the idea of social revolution.“ He attributed this change to the fact that Socialism „is now fight­ing for power and the bourgeoisie, disintegrat­ing and realising the inevitability of its doom, is exerting every effort to ... maintain its rule under the new conditions, at the cost of partial and spurious concessions" — as if nobody had contemplated „concessions" before. The most interesting passage in this article, however, is the following: „As the only con­sistently revolutionary class of modern society, the proletariat must be the leader in the struggle of the whole people for a fully democratic revolution, in the struggle of a 11 the working and exploited people against the oppressors and exploiters. The proletariat is revolutionary only in so far as it is conscious of and gives effect to this idea of the hegemony of the proletariat." There is a clear contradiction here; the last sentence is saying that the proletariat is not necessarily „consistently revolutionary." Lenin, moreover, is contradicting not only himself but also Marx; the statement that „the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class" comes straight out of the Communist Manifesto (Ch. I.) So the „class struggle" turns out to be a struggle between revolutionaries fighting in the name of the proletariat and their opponents, whom the revolutionaries dub the „bourgeoisie". This revolution, too, must be violent. As Lenin said in his Letter to American Workers (August, 1918), „In revolutionary epochs the class struggle has always, inevitably and in every country, assumed the form of civil war, and civil war is inconceivable without the severest de­struction, terror and the restriction of formal demoracy in the interests of this war. Only unctuous parsons — whether Christian or ’secular’ in the persons of parlour, parlia­mentary Socialists — cannot see, understand and feel this necessity. Only a lifeless ’man in the muffler’ can shun the revolution for this reason instead of plunging into battle with the utmost ardour and determination at a time when history demands that the greatest probelms of humanity be solved by struggle and war." A ruler who comes to power by such a pro­cess, as Lenin’s rule shows, is unlikely to take kindly to any suggestion that reforms may be needed. Let us however jump 45 years, far beyond the „revolutionary epoch“ in Russia, to November 1963, when one of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished soldiers, Maj.-Gen. Pyotr Grigorenko, founded a small group critical of some aspects of the Khrushchev administra­tion then in power. He called it the „Group for the struggle to revive Leninism.“ Arrested in February, 1964, Grigorenko was charged with „anti-Soviet agitation“ and then, in Mardi, sent for examination to the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. The commission which examined him found him to be suffering from a psychological illness „characterised by the presence of reformist ideas, in particular for the reorganisation of the State apparatus; this was linked with an over-estima­tion of his own personality which reached Mes­sianic proportions.“ Here is „reformist“ as a post-revolutionary boo-word. Grigorenko was confined to the special psych­iatric hospital in Leningrad. Although he was released from there in April, 1965, after the fall of Khrushchev, his troubles were by no means over. The Grigorenko case showed that „reformist ideas“ are treated as both an offence and an illness. Grigorenko was compulsorily consigned to a mental hospital as a patient, but also punished as a criminal by deprivation of his army rank, forfeiture of his pension, and expul­sion from the Party. Similarly the geneticist, Zhores Medvedev, was found in 1970 to be suffering from „sluggish schizophrenia“ accompanied by „paranoid delu­sions of reforming society" and, among other things, a „split personality“ and „over-estimation of his own personality." The reasons which have prompted such dia­gnoses include: pointing out violations by the Soviet authorities of the Constitution and stand­ing up for the rights of minorities, like Grigo­­renko’s championship of the Crimean Tatars. What matters with proposals for reform is not the proposals themselves, but rather who advances them and when. What would have happened to an ordinary citizen who kept say­ing, as Gorbachev has now done, that drunken­ness was rife in the Soviet Union and must be stopped? Those who propose reforms or new inter­pretations of particular Marxist-Leninist doct­rines are liable to be called „revisionists", another important Communist boo-word which we will consider next in this series. 3 JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 198«

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